Reflections on the state of the world which proceed with the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Mourning in America – Part VI: From Evangelicals to Anti-Christs

If there were any clear losers
in this election, it was America’s white evangelicals. Under the guise of the Moral
Majority and “values voters,” these self-appointed guardians of America’s
supposed “traditional family values” have historically sought to bring focus to
issues of character and morality, the latter almost inevitably cast in terms of
repressive sexual mores. Presuming to speak in the name of G-d, evangelical
Protestantism has been the face of the Christian religion in virtually all the
parts of the country that turned dark red on election day.

But in this election, white
evangelicals embraced the candidate whose character was the antithesis of
traditional evangelical values - a serial polygamist and a misogynist who
routinely abused many of the women with whom he came into contact. In doing so,
evangelicals revealed that they had given up any pretense of concern for their
tradition’svalues.

But that sexual pathology was
but the tip of the iceberg.

With the embrace of a
candidate who proudly and repeatedly demonstrated a virulently misanthropic
vision - marked by its denial of the humanity of women, immigrants, veterans,
LBGTQ people, Muslims, Mexicans and people of color - any pretense that a
religion invoking the name of Jesus of Nazareth was the basis for their vote
could no longer be maintained in good faith. Indeed, as evangelical theologian and
Sojourners editor Jim Wallis put it,in the end
white evangelical support for Trump proved “literally antithetical to every
Christian value.”

Truncated Visions of Spirit

In all fairness, I must
confess up front to never having had a terribly high impression of
evangelicalism dating back to my first contacts with it in my childhood. Sin/salvation
theologies have always struck me as simplistic, overly moralistic and heavily
control oriented. Sola scriptura,
while initially an effective critique of Roman Catholic tradition, was born on
a slippery slope that more often than not ends in bibliolatry.

None of that ever made much
sense to me.

Even so, I have always admired
evangelical facility with the text of scriptures even as it is most often
engaged absent any level of critical context or subtext. That tends to render
the reader free to apply his or her own context and subtext in order for the
text to make sense.

Little wonder evangelicalism
has historically been highly sectarian.

Moreover, the Hebrew and
Christian Scriptures form a major part of the bedrock of western culture. It is
impossible to understand what it means to be human in the 21st CE West
without some level of awareness of those scriptures.

The texts that we Christians
call our Bible contain much that is worthy of our consideration. Unfortunately,
it also contains much that we need to recognize as the products of a culture
from a different place and time which, when appropriated acontexutally and
imposed on a modern western culture, can form the roots of cultural tyranny.

I have lived among
evangelicals all my life including some of my own family members and many I
call my friends. While I have learned the hard way not to talk about religion
or politics with them, I also have borne a modicum of respect if not so much
for the content of their belief systems than their insistence upon their right
to hold those beliefs as they see fit. And I have learned to appreciate them
for their devotion to their religious path, however untenable I may find it
personally.

That is precisely why their
behavior in this election, which proved to be the absolute antithesis of whatever
might have been admirable about their spiritual path, was so disappointing.

Until recently the marks of
American evangelicalism could largely be summed up in two words: Piety and
Purity.

The former is observable in
the devotion of its members to the practices they call Bible study. Assessing such
practices as actual “study” stretches the definition to the breaking point.
Most bible studies pay little attention to its historical, contextual or
critical elements focusing instead on individual applications of scripture to
one’s immediate life or inherited theological understandings swallowed whole.

Even so, the devotion of the
attendees is remarkable. And their tendencies to attend worship services in
their churches on a regular basis speaks volumes to their concern for piety.

Piety can also seen in the
dogged insistence of evangelicals upon evangelizing others, making stands and
giving testimony to what they see as the one true faith. This often occurs in
settings which evidence a tone-deafness to context or any consideration for
others.

We encounter this piety in football
players pointing to heaven to thank the deity for a touchdown catch (like G-d
really made the defensive player fall down), street corner evangelizers with
bullhorns blasting Hell fire and damnation to bemused passersby and tracts bearing
“turn or burn” messages left in public toilet stalls. What is more remarkable
about these efforts is less the content of the message as much as the
perseverance of the messengers, particularly in the face of a public that is
often disinterested at best and irritated at worst.

The concern for purity has
historically been observable in the evangelical obsession with controlling the
human body generally and the resulting politics of genitalia. Evangelicals have
long advocated abstinence only approaches to birth control outside of marriage
and their states generally reflect the short-sightedness of this approach with
their high rates of illegitimacy and teen births.

Similarly, until this
election, evangelicals have opposed pornography even as their states show the highest rates of its
consumption online. And, sadly, evangelicals routinely confuse the social
prejudice of homophobia with a tenet of revealed faith and their states have
the highest rates of homophobic hate crime and discriminatory laws to show for it.

But the behavior of white
evangelicals in the 2016 Election signals a paradigm shift which reveals the
values of Trumpland. Where evangelicals were previously focused on piety and
purity, a new set of values have taken their place: Power, Privilege,
Punitiveness all in service of Patriarchy.

An Out for White Evangelicals

Mennonite theologian Howard Yoder assessed white evangelical support for Trump as having three
bases: opposition to abortion, desires to dominate the Supreme Court and an
irrational, obsessive hatred of a demonized caricature of Hillary Clinton. Yoder noted
that the violent images of a Clinton who supported “ripping babies out of
mothers’ wombs” had never been Clinton’s position and that Trump had, for most
of his life, supported abortion. “Such facts aside, saving babies always seemed
to be the major reason cited by evangelicals for supporting the Trump ticket.”

Evangelicals were not always
obsessed with abortion. Initially
neutral or even supportive of abortion rights when that issue came to a head in
the late 1970s with the Roe v. Wade
case, it is only over the past three decades evangelicals have become defined
by their opposition to abortion under any conditions. Several evangelical
dominated statehouses have recently pushed through legislation to make
abortions impossible through disingenuous “safety regulations,” some even requiring
funerals for aborted fetuses.

It would be the willingness of
Trump to play to that obsession that would provide evangelical voters their needed
rationalization for supporting a monster who was the antithesis of their
values. Focusing on the desire for a political appointment to the Supreme Court
who would ultimately undo Roe v. Wade,
evangelical voters gladly threw away their concerns for character and morality
while telling themselves it was all about abortion.

In the end they would help
elect a candidate who has himself supported abortion. They would elect a First
Lady who is the candidate’s third wife and a former pornography star. They
would elect a candidate who publicly obsessed over women’s menstrual cycles
during the debates and thereafter on Twitter and confessed to his desire to
engage in sexual assaults. Indeed, several of the women he had formerly
encountered alleged this was not mere wishful thinking on the Donald’s part.

Abortion votes on the Supreme
Court became the very slender reed with which evangelicals rationalized their
decision to blacken the circle next to the name of a monster. But at a very
basic level, it signaled the end of any claims the religious right could hold
to being the moral conscience of the nation.

Caucasian Uber Alles

Many analysts prior to the
election believed that Trump’s misogyny would alienate enough women to insure
Hillary Clinton’s election. From his boasting of his sense of entitlement to
grab women by their vaginas to his constantly demeaning references to Hillary Clinton
as “that nasty woman,” the presumption was that women generally - and
evangelical women in particular - would find such adolescent and blatantly
misogynist behavior the bottom line in determining their vote. Many of them
told the pollsters as much.

Ultimately, it did not prove
to be so. As I see it, there were two reasons for this.

One of the revelations of the
post-modern movement has been the phenomenon of intersectionality, the way in
which multiple social constructions, the discriminations that emanate from them
and the privileges they bestow or withhold, can intersect within a given
individual. A woman of color who is lesbian, for instance, is negatively
socially impacted in three different ways in a sexist, racist and homophobic
culture. Determining how to balance concerns is an ongoing work in progress for
those enduring intersectional discriminations.

While the Clinton campaign bet
the farm on the sexist piece as the bottom line, in the end it was race which proved
to be the determining factor. That’s hardly surprising. If Jim Wallis is
correct that slavery - and its toxic progeny racism -are America’s original sin, the power and
privilege of race would be the bottom line for white women.

Given the racial breakdown of
the electorate, it appears that this bottom line proved decisive for white
women generally. Why would they want to give up their privilege in a racist
society so long as their race
maintained the power to dominate it? Such would be a particularly pointed
concern at the end of eight years of a mixed-race presidency by an electorate
in which predictable white dominance was demonstrably eroding away.

As Marcie Bianco notes in her
online essay “What Sisterhood?“, white women have a long history of betraying their sisters
of color. Why? Because, as the article’s title suggests, “they still believe white
men are their saviors.” Indeed, it is precisely their willing participation in
patriarchy historically – and the benefits which have flowed from that
participation - that has insured its ongoing power.

For evangelicals, Donald Trump
became the apotheosis of this conjunction of new evangelical values of power,
privilege, punitiveness and patriarchy. In
the end they chose to worship a misogynist white Messiah

Jesus Who?

8 Again,
the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of
the world and their splendour; 9and he said to him, ‘All
these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’ 10Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! for
it is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”11Then the devil left him, and
suddenly angels came and waited on him.Matthew 4

If evangelicals betrayed their
own values in this election, trading in concerns for purity and piety for the
concerns of mammon – power, privilege, punitiveness and patriarchy – the more
serious loss in this exchange was the core of their own sacred identity. They
may have helped elect a monster who at least paid face value to a will to power
ultimately focused on imposing their theological agenda on the country. But in
the process they managed to sell their very souls to the Great Tempter.

In the first two centuries,
the followers of Jesus were busy arguing among themselves about the Way of Jesus
they sought to follow. Increasingly concern for orthopraxis, a way of living, would
be lost as groups organized around competing orthodoxies, constructions of the
Christos, the anointed one, vying with one another for the power to define an
emerging new religion called Christianity. With the recognition of Christianity
as the imperial religion in the 4th CE, a creedal Christianity
would increasingly reflect the values of that empire: power, privilege,
punitiveness and patriarchy.

That trajectory has reached
its logical conclusion with the 2016 election. The most fervent supporters of an
immoral monster crowned as messianic savior were those whose evangelical faith
was their common denominator. In the end, nothing could have been less like the
Jesus whose name they invoked.

The Jesus of the Gospels was
himself an immigrant, surviving the great infanticide of Herod the Great’s
purge because of the largesse of Egypt where his family fled as refugees. Trump demonized
immigrants caricaturizing them as drug dealers and murderers, pledging to build
a wall to keep them out.

The Jesus of the Gospels
routinely demonstrated respect for women, particularly noteworthy in a strongly
patriarchal culture. He engaged women as valued individuals, accepting their
confrontation of his own misanthropic views of outsiders in his exchange with
the Canaanite woman. He challenged the men ready to stone the woman caught in
adultery knowing thatadultery always required two participants, one of whom was male and who
was likely present, stone in hand. Trump routinely demeaned women, boasted of
accosting women and many stepped forward to accuse him of sexual improprieties.

The Jesus of the Gospels
demonstrated a respect for the practice of marriage, challenging the patriarchal customs of his day in which women could be discarded as one more
consumer good and replaced with another. Trump is on his third wife and made
most of the country nauseous with statements that he saw his daughter as “a
piece of ass” that, were he not her father, he’d “go for it.”

The Jesus of the Gospels cast a
despised Samaritan, a resident of the region bordering his own Judea whose
religion was seen as inferior by devout Jews, as the hero of the parableabout how to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Trump painted
Muslims as terrorists.

The Jesus of the Gospels
routinely encouraged the poor, telling them that G-d saw them as “blessed” and advising
his followers to give to those who beg. Trump consistently fails to pay his
laborers, has opposed any kind of raise to approximate a living wage for
workers and routinely demonizes unions.

It is pretty clear the poor will be
anything but blessed in Trumpland.

The New Antichrists

In the first couple of
centuries of the common era, as the developing Christian tradition sought to
define itself, it was the custom of competing groups to anathematize their
competitors. Long before the AntiChrist - an archetypal bogeyman largely
constructed by televangelists and film makers - became the obsession of
evangelicals, early Christians called each other out when their beliefs and
their behaviors were seen as adversarial to the Way of Jesus.

They called them anti-christs, those
who beliefs and behaviors were the antithesis of the Christ whose Way they sought to follow.

With the shift of focus of white
evangelicals in Trumpland, that assessment once again seems appropriate.Whatever else Trump may have been about, he
was clearly not about the Way of Jesus. And whatever else his evangelical
supporters may say they are about, their values and the candidate they have just
helped elect epitomize just the opposite of that Way.

In perhaps one of history’s
greatest ironies, it is those who believe they have acted in the name of Jesus
who have become the antichrists of Trumpland. And it is they who drove the
nails through the wrists and ankles of a once great nation now crucified, a
people once called America.

About Me

I am a fifth generation Floridian, a fourth generation educator, third generation college educator. My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright so I guess it was fate that I would end up a teacher. I am a recovering lawyer who still holds an inactive license with the Florida Bar (I stopped practice in 1990) and an ordained Episcopal priest. My spirituality is that of an inner world (nature) mystic. I am Franciscan to my very core, a professed member of 26 years in the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF). Andy , my gentle souled, soft-spoken partner of 44 years became my legal husband in 2010 on the steps of the US Supreme Court. He is G-d's greatest gift to my life. I live within two hours of my nuclear family members. Historically I have been a yellow dawg Democrat though my politics are decidedly Green. I hold a Ph.D. in Religion, Law and Society from FSU, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, member seminary of the GTU in Berkeley, CA, and a J.D. and a B.A. in History and Secondary Ed from the University of Florida. I complete a two year program at Richard Rohr’s Living School for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM August 2017.